MTG: Pet Cards XIII, Innistrad Block

God, I love this set. I love Innistrad for its flavour and its aesthetics, and also because it sort of represents the reality I understood of the world growing up. Trust the masters, trust the pastors, because they know what’s going on. Outside is dark, outside is lonely, do not go outside, do not risk the night.

There are wolves.

And they will make you one of them.

Aristocrat fan that I am you can see obvious faves in this set of Unruly Mob and Falkenrath Noble. They’re quite obvious. Also control finishers like Mirror-Mad Phantasm, and the puzzlebox finisher like Ludevic’s Test Subject and Cackling Counterpart (‘what’s the most broken thing in Commander, if you have two of them?’), but my favourite card from this set, the one I keep going back to when I see a new spoiler, even if I have to try and play with it in modern…

It’s funny going back over this block and realising just how much of the spine of Modern, the format, exists here. Even if it’s not specifically from Innistrad, this set is full of cards that you have to bear in mind when you build decks, like Lingering Souls and Faithless Looting. Yeah, I’ve played with them – a bit – but they’re more like reliable staples. There’s a cycle of tribal lords (and I played with Drogskol Captain quite a bit in a blue-white skies deck that I remember fondly), and there is Avacyn’s Collar – the symbol of Avacyn’s church.

There is also Grafdigger’s Cage, one of those cards I hate the most in all of Magic, because it’s such a simple, oblative and cheap solution to the strategies it’s meant to fight and it fights them in such a boring way. It doesn’t even kill those strategies at the top level, it just makes casual graveyard decks miserable. Booo.

If the above didn’t tip you off, I like graveyard strategies. I like playing with cards that come back from the dead. White gets cards that interact with this juuuust commonly enough to remind you that white can muck around in the graveyard. Thanks to Populate, white can even do things to keep the Seance tokens around!

For a time there I really liked Lightning Mauler because I saw it as a pseudo-Fires of Yavimaya, launching 3 drops into hasty spaces and then DYING, but it didn’t work as well as you might imagine.

There’s a LOT of good stuff in this set.

Surprise! It’s a utility removal creature! God, how expensive does an exile have to be that I’ll still play it? Apparently, nine mana. Dark Imposter gets to eat your opponents’ creatures, which is cool, but also it gets to take their special abilities. Normally, spending six mana to kill a small, utility creature is a super drag, but in this case it’s exciting because now those creatures are your creatures.

Oh, and it’s a Vampire, because there aren’t any good tribal synergies there, are there?